Perry Hewitt is part of the small but impressive club of female Chief Digital Officers (other members include Rachel Sterne and Angela Wei). You may not be familiar with the title of CDO: it's a relatively new role created to help organizations navigate the world of digital media. Given the complexity of the job, and the whole tool box of skills it requires, it's a safe bet that anyone carrying around the title is uniquely talented. And if you're the CDO of Harvard University? There are few higher and more challenging posts out there for a digital strategist.

What’s more, Perry is an incredibly accomplished individual -- and one whom I’ve come to look to for modeling my own career given her roles at a disruptive agency (Razorfish), a data-driven startup (Crimson Hexagon) and now one of the world’s leading universities (Harvard).

Since joining Harvard nearly three years ago, she has played a key role in some monumental changes at this prestigious school. She oversaw the recent redesign of Harvard's website, which earned the school an Interactive Media Award—with a perfect score, no less! She has also helped to develop Harvard-related images for alumni and fans on Facebook—of which there are more than one million—to use with the new Timeline layout.

Helping a nearly 400-year-old institution create and maintain an impressive social media presence is no easy task. Not to mention establishing the new role of CDO within the organization. Let's hear more on this from her...

LB: In a discussion on social media at Harvard, you spoke about the effects of social media on story-telling. How are you and your team telling the story of Harvard? What are you wanting to tell, but haven’t found the right way yet?

PH: Our belief is that individual voices can resonate more than institutional ones — even and perhaps especially for organizations with global reach. Social is an ideal way to share these individual voices, and we use platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube EDU to "show, don't tell." From a content perspective, we're doing much more multimedia with projects like Harvard Stories to surface individual experiences of the University. This year, for the first time, President's Faust's opening message to the University was delivered as a video — and elicited a lot of positive response, especially from students. Our belief is that social stories allow us to shift the balance from only heavily curated narratives of Harvard to a plethora of personal ones. We do try to "shape" stories by organizing them into categories that we think are important to emphasize. But beyond that, we're applying good cooking advice: fresh and diverse ingredients, minimal processing.

In terms of where we'd like to go, there's certainly room for growth around event-based social stories. University-wide events like commencement are fertile ground for social content in a world where everyone is independently creating media around shared experiences.

LB: In the same interview, you discuss the concept of “writing yourself into being.” Can you talk about this process and how you use it in shaping Harvard’s online presence?

PH:The concept of "writing yourself into being" comes from Danah Boyd's compelling work on teens and social networks; how teens use public social personae in part to shape who they are or may become. Harvard, like many institutions, had an opportunity to use social tools to surface information from across this large and busy university to tell its story. Rather than funnel through a central communications office in an effort to control all University-wide social content, we chose an approach of aggregating content, syndicating it out through owned channels like our social dashboard or outposts like Twitter and YouTube, and reaping the benefits of amplification.